Not often did Lisa Cuddy get a chance to watch the cable news networks. It seemed like her life consisted of an endless cycle of work and sleep, sometimes broken up by a lunch with friends or a social event. Other then a brief glance at the local news and the headlines on her email client, she was more concerned with the affairs of Princeton-Plainsboro then the rest of the world. That's why she was a good dean of medicine, even if it did leave her a little out of the loop sometimes when talk turned to current affairs.
Tonight was the rare occasion she found herself sitting in front of the TV and aimlessly flicking through the channels. It had been a week since the birth mother she'd picked had decided that she would keep little Joy and she hadn't been sleeping well. Cuddy still couldn't believe that the young woman had chosen to keep the baby on the spur of the moment because she was tired of being a loser. What about Joy's welfare? How was she going to provide for the child? It was those questions that kept her up, and it was those questions that she would never know the answers.
As she flipped aimlessly through the channels she came across the block of three or four channels of cable news. The picture of a beautiful little girl with brown hair and brown eyes made her pause for a moment. Across the bottom of the screen there was a banner saying the girl's mother was up on trial for her murder. Cuddy's fist curled tight around the remote with anger and she started to flip through the channels again.
Once she made it up into the triple digits, she turned the TV off and threw the remote onto the couch beside her, unable to get the angelic face of the murdered girl out of her mind. As a doctor obviously she knew all about the predation of children, but to think that a woman had been blessed with that beautiful little girl only to snuff out her life... It was almost unimaginable to someone who so badly wanted a child of her own.
Cuddy curled her knees under her chin and felt the tears start to fall again for the thousandth time in that past week. She thought she'd cried out all the anger and grief over Joy, but the thought of women who hurt the little children they were blessed with was too much for her. She could only whisper a half-sobbed prayer that if the birth mother didn't find motherhood to be what she thought it would be, that little Joy would not meet the same fate.
